Text turns out blurry - why is that? 1

[Tina2002]

Hi!

I have noticed that any text I use in photopaint for things like the size of average banners turns out quite blurry.

I don't do things like stretch a size 8 font to size 15 or anything like that, and it turns out blurry even when I use a sharpen filter on it several times.

Does anyone know how to minimize blurry text in photopaint?

Also I have noticed that unless I duplicate text over text the colors are quite faded, and it's not my monitor.
Does anyone know how to get nice unfaded and crisp text?

Ty
Tina

 

[attrofy]

A little more info might be required, but if I had to guess, it has to do with thte resolution of your image. My guess is you are taking an image off of the web, or using an image for web graphics, which is about 72 dpi, and trying to insert some text ontop of that image. This will always result in jaggy text. The other thing might be if you are creating an image from scratch, you probably have the dpi set too low. For crisp clear images, you need to start with at least a 72 dpi image, and make sure your not using an 8 bit pallete that has been "adapted" to the colors of the image you are working with. This should give nice crisp text. If you have to use an image that came from the web, that has and adaptive pallete (limited colors), start a new image, and set the resolution to 96 (assuming that you are going back to display only - no printing) and start with 24 bit colors. Then import the image you have to use as an object. This will allow the new project to use its own color pallete (16 million colors). Then when you make the adjustments you need, crop, mask, etc. If you are going back to web, convert to an 8 bit pallete (or just export as .gif or .jpg) This should get you going.

HTH,
Russell

 

[Tina2002]

Hi!

I'll keep that in mind - thanks for the info....

Ok here's more info for that: the text in question was created using the text tool in photopaint. It is set at 72dpi, and when I right-clik the image and choose info, it says at the bottom
"Subformat: Mixed"
"Type: 24bit RGB"

I am not sure What subformat means, nor am i very familiar with 24bit RGB.

I use photopaint at 800x600 resolution just to see how blurry the finished text is, but still it is so bad that most text I can't use anyway, especially if I add something like perspective to it.

I also always convert my images of text into .jpgs as that is the only thing I import into Frontpage. But it's not the conversion that's making it worse, it's bad to begin with lol.

I am using photopaint version 9
Where do I find the correct color pallette? Does it have a name? I think what I am using is called "corel photopaint palette". It's the one that first opened when I started using corel photopaint.
Is this the right one?
Or are there others built into photopaint, because I can't find them lol.

Ty
Tina

 

[attrofy]

Allright, I think I figured it out. Try setting your dpi to higher setting than you will finish with - 300 dpi is what I usually use - and now I understand why....
Here is what is happening. The text is too big for the number of pixels you have. Here is an example you can try, and maybe will clarify what is happening.
Start a new image. Set the dpi to 72, and make the image size like 2X2. Go into your new image and create some text (like "abc&quot and set the size to 24 pt. Now zoom in pretty tight on it. Notice how it looks jaggy. Now if you increase the text size, say to 150 pt, it looks alot less jaggy. Now decrease the size to say 14 pt. Starts looking a little jaggy. Now resize to 8 pt. Almost illegible. The reason is you are trying to fit too muchinfo into too small of a space. In other words, you are trying to display an image that requires 18 blocks to display, and only allowing the program to use 5 blocks to display it. So what is happening is it is rendering the iimage to a size it can handle, which in this case, is too little resolution. So the way to overcome this is to start your same 2X2 image at say 300 or so dpi. If you try 150 dpi, you will notice a definate improvement, but still get some jaggys. The smaller the final text, the higher the resolution required to create the image.

Before you panic when you see a one line text image at 1.2MB, there is hope for smaller sized graphics. Once the image is set the way you like (i.e. shadows, perspctive, blends and blurs) then resample the image. For web output I have better luck with 96 dpi on complex images. For simple, one color text, 72 dpi is ok. One more thing ought to be mentioned here. The color choice for your text makes a big difference too. If you are trying to display small legible button type text, use as pure a color as you can find. By pure I mean it doesn't require too many colors to compose the color. If you look closely at your zoomed in image, you'll see a few different colors that are making up the perceived color. The more colors required to compose that color, the more you will lose as the image is resampled.

Hope this clarifies things. Start big, end small. If you find 300dpi is not solving your problem, try 600. You'll eventually find a size that works for you. Also, it should be noted that this will preserve most of your effects you are trying to accomplish. There is going to be a limit that you reach, no matter how big you start, you will hit a limit that the image just loses too much in the translation. If that happens, you may have to settle for a physically larger image size (say 4X4 as opposed to 2X2) but then you can shrink the dpi count to a lower number. Then when you insert the image into your project, force the image to the smaller size. This should get you rolling in the right direction.

Russ

 

[Tina2002]

Wow - that seems to work a lot better now.

I am just curious - should I be doing text in Draw instead of doing it in photopaint (starting off of course at 300dpi), and then importing it into Photopaint?

And also I have one more thing I am trying to accomplish with my text is to give it a border by right clicking a color when editing the text - however at 300dpi I get a super fine edge that isn't visible compared to when I was creating text effects at 72dpi.

Ty
Tina

 

[attrofy]

My experience has been that if your final destination for the image is monitor only (i.e. web, software applications, etc) you have better effects and control with paint. Both will give you adequate results, it's just that paint has more "eyecandy" options. Draw lends itself better to printed material.

As for the border, I assume you are dealing with Draw. THe best way to handle that is to go to your border options and select the line above hairline (I believe it is 1.5 pt). Again, the only time this usually comes into play is when you are outputting to print. For screen presentation, it is usually WYSIWYG all the way around. If you are using paint, occasionally you will loose some definiton when resampling to a smaller image. This can usually be overcome with a different choice of colors or playing with masking tools in paint. The best options for masking are either "Grow", "Similar", "Color Mask", and "feather". Occasionally "Border" works good, depending on what effect you are trying to achieve.